Short course
Advanced Excel for finance
Finance is practised on spreadsheets, everywhere and at every level: a cash flow plan, a budget, a business plan, an investment appraisal, a loan repayment schedule. Yet most financial files you come across are fragile: assumptions buried in formulas, hard-coded figures, no way of testing a scenario, and a sign error that distorts an entire decision.
- Duration
- Short module, 5 sessions of 3 hours, 15 hours
- Format
- In person or online
- Credential
- Certificate of attendance
Tuition75,000 XOF
By the end of the programme, you will be able to
- Build a structured financial model, with isolated assumptions and traceable calculations
- Build a detailed annual budget and track variances between planned and actual
- Build a monthly cash flow plan and anticipate financing needs
- Prepare a projected income statement and balance sheet that are consistent with each other
- Calculate and interpret net present value, internal rate of return and payback period
- Build a loan repayment schedule and compare financing offers
- Calculate a cost of capital and a break-even point
- Carry out a sensitivity analysis and build scenarios
- Calculate the essential financial ratios and comment on them honestly
- Build a readable financial dashboard for a management committee
- Use artificial intelligence to write, explain and audit financial formulas
- Produce the executive summary of a financing file from your own model
Who it is for
Target audience
The module is for people who produce or defend financial figures: administrative and finance managers, management controllers, accountants moving into management, loan officers and analysts in financial institutions, entrepreneurs and project leaders, cooperative managers, programme officers who build budgets, finance and management students.
Prerequisites
Two requirements:
- Know the basic financial concepts: expenses, revenue, profit, cash, investment
- Have a laptop, or rent one from the centre for the duration of the module
Participants are invited to bring a real project, a budget or a financing application in preparation: the model built in class is their own.
Detailed program
5 sessions · 15 h of teaching
- Why most financial files are dangerous, and what makes them reliable
- Strict separation between the assumptions sheet, calculation sheets and output sheets
- Banning hard-coded figures inside formulas
- Cell colour coding: input, calculation, link, check
- Named ranges and structured tables for readability
- Absolute, relative and mixed references, and the single copyable formula
- Logical and conditional functions useful for driving a model
- Check cells and integrity tests that flag inconsistencies
- Formula auditing: precedents, dependents, step-by-step evaluation
- Documenting the model and the reading guide for a third party
- Exercise: build the framework of your model, with a complete assumptions sheet
- Building a budget by type of expense and by responsibility centre
- Budgeting revenue: volume, price and seasonality assumptions
- The monthly budget and its consistency with the annual budget
- Budget monitoring: planned, actual, variance in value, variance in percentage, burn rate
- Analysing variances and commenting on them, what management really expects
- The monthly cash flow plan: receipts, payments, opening and closing balance
- Timing differences in customer receipts and supplier payments
- Spotting months under pressure and calculating the financing need
- Working capital requirement and how to finance it
- Budget tracking and cumulative cash flow charts
- Exercise: build the budget and cash flow plan for your real activity
- The time value of money explained through calculation, without excessive formalism
- Discounting and choosing the discount rate, the most debated decision in any file
- Net present value: calculation, interpretation, sign and period pitfalls
- Internal rate of return, its limits and the cases where it misleads
- Simple and discounted payback period
- The profitability index and comparing projects of different sizes
- A loan repayment schedule: equal instalments, equal principal, grace period
- Calculating the real cost of a loan and comparing two bank offers
- Leasing versus buying with own funds, a costed comparison
- The weighted average cost of capital and using it sensibly
- Break-even point, break-even date and operating leverage
- Exercise: appraise a real investment and choose between two financing options
- The projected income statement built from the assumptions
- The projected balance sheet and its balance, the check that reveals every error in the model
- The projected cash flow statement
- Closing the loop and checking consistency between the three statements
- One-variable sensitivity analysis and the two-variable data table
- The scenario manager: pessimistic, central, optimistic
- Goal seek to answer the question of the minimum price or volume
- Solver for simple optimisation under constraints
- Essential financial ratios: structure, liquidity, profitability, debt, coverage
- The one-page financial dashboard and the charts that make it readable
- Presenting to a committee: what to show and what to keep in the appendix
- Exercise: produce projected statements over three years and three scenarios
- What artificial intelligence brings to a finance professional, and the limits never to cross
- Confidentiality of financial data and what should not be sent to an external service
- Having a complex financial formula written and explained, then checking it yourself
- Having an existing model audited for broken references and hard-coded figures
- Having a model inherited from a predecessor explained, sheet by sheet
- Having the assumptions of a business plan documented and justified
- Having a set of projected statements commented and getting an analysis to rework
- Writing the executive summary of a financing file for a bank
- Adapting the same financial analysis to three audiences: management, banker, technical partner
- Having a starter model built from a written specification, then taking it over
- Systematic checking: recalculating by hand the three figures that drive the decision
- Automating the production and monthly sending of the financial dashboard, without programming
- Final exercise: finalise your model, produce your executive summary and present it to the group
- Presentation of attestations
Assessment and certification
The training attestation is issued to participants who have attended at least four of the five sessions and submitted their finalised financial model. It states the module title, the 15-hour duration, the dates and the skills acquired, and carries a unique number with a verification code.
Participants also receive:
- The financial model they built on their own project
- A three-year costed business plan template, ready to configure
- A budget and variance tracking workbook
- An investment appraisal and loan offer comparison workbook
- The complete course material in PDF, session by session
- A quick reference of Excel's financial functions
- A library of ready-to-use prompts for artificial intelligence assistants
Upcoming sessions
Next dates being prepared
Leave your email: we will let you know as soon as registration opens.
Frequently asked questions
75,000 XOF per participant. Training for a team or an organisation is quoted on request.
5 sessions of 3 hours, 15 hours.
Yes: you can attend onsite or online, as you prefer.
Two requirements: know the basic financial concepts: expenses, revenue, profit, cash, investment ; have a laptop, or rent one from the centre for the duration of the module ; participants are invited to bring a real project, a budget or a financing application in preparation: the model built in class is their own.
A certificate of attendance is issued at the end of the course.
Fill in the online enrolment request: no payment is taken on the site. The firm reviews your application, then contacts you to confirm your place and the payment terms. No session is scheduled yet: leave your email on this page to be told when registration opens.
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Cohorts are deliberately small to guarantee genuine individual support. Reserve your place or ask us your questions.